Paulina Bren: There was a large spectrum of collaboration during
normalisation – just to function, you had to be somewhere on it

In her book The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the
1968 Prague Spring, historian Paulina Bren offers fresh perspectives on
various aspects of Czechoslovakia’s normalisation period. These include
how the Communists used TV serials to get their message across at a time
when the nation, forced to accept the re-imposition of relatively hardline
rule, largely turned inward. She makes particular reference to TV writer
Jaroslav Dietl, creator of some of the most popular shows of that era.

Paulina Bren / Pavlína Břeňová, photo: Ian WilloughbyBut when we met in New York, Bren, who was born Pavlína Břeňová in
Brno, first told me how her own family had escaped Czechoslovakia when she
was an infant – at the very time normalisation was starting to take hold.

“My parents left with me and my sister in September of 1969, just a few
weeks before the borders closed.

“Of course at the time they needed an exit visa and they needed an
invitation letter.

“My mother wrote to a friend of hers, Zdena Zábranská, who was a poet.

Zdena Zábranská, photo: Czech Television
“She and her husband were in Paris and they received the letter literally
as they were closing the door on their apartment and heading to the train
station to return to Prague.

“Zdena quickly penned a letter pretending she was some French person
living in Paris.

“My mother received it. It was just for my father and her, so she quickly
added ‘et les enfants’, which was my sister and me.

“So that’s how the exit visa happened. This was already a year after
the invasion, so really at that point Czechoslovakia was very much cut off
from the West.

“But the Hotel International in Brno still was getting Western
newspapers.

“My mother was sick and stayed with us. He headed to London, showed up at
this firm, they didn’t know what he was doing there and he didn’t have
an interview.

“But they interviewed him and gave him a job on the spot.

“My mother, my sister and I followed soon after and three weeks later the
borders closed.

“So it was two kids, two suitcases and 100 dollars, because they had to
leave everything behind and pretend they were going on vacation.”

Jumping forward quite a way, in your book The Greengrocer and His
Television, you talk about being in Prague in the late 1980s and getting
under the space where the Stalin statue had stood. How did you get in there
and what did you find there?

“I became obsessed with coming to Prague and I couldn’t find a way to
do it. I finally decided to just come on a tourist visa.

“While I was waiting for the tourist visa I was in London and to stay in
cheap accommodation I stayed at the Catholic Czech centre Velehrad, where I
had always gone every Saturday to learn how to say ‘ř’.

“I met an artist there named Petr Petr, who had just escaped from Prague.
So it was sort of bizarre as I was now heading to Prague.

“He introduced me to all of his artist friends, so I had a really
interesting view of Prague. I was there for a month.

“One of these artist friends who was a climber – a caver, I suppose
they’re called – and another friend decided it would be really amusing
to take me down under Stalin.

“Of course it was completely illegal, but they had done it several times.

“So: middle of the night, flashlights and so forth. And they knew how to
get in there.

“It was quite scary, especially this moment where there was just a mound
of thousands and thousands of shoes.

“Of course that is reminiscent for anybody of the Holocaust.

“Normalisation is a strange word. The first official enunciation happened
when Dubček and his cabinet were returned from house arrest in Moscow.”

“I don’t know what they were doing there, but that image has always
stuck with me.”

The central theme of your book is the normalisation period in
Czechoslovakia. I’ve always thought normalisation was a very strange
word. Who coined the word, or when did it enter usage?

“It is a strange word. The first official enunciation happened when
Dubček and his cabinet were returned from house arrest in Moscow, a week
after the invasion.

Alexander Dubček, photo: YouTube
“He went on the radio in Czechoslovakia and explained that they had come
to an agreement about the rapid normalisation of the situation.

“It became an official word for it. Husák after 1989 claimed that he did
not conceive of the idea of normalisation – everybody did, because what
else to do with thousands of Soviet troops now occupying Czechoslovakia.

“What I love is that the sort of Czech penchant for the absurd made it
also very appropriate. Because what else to call the abnormality of
normalisation than ‘normalizace’.”

In your book there’s one fact that I found completely eye-popping –
I’d never heard it before. It relates to the screenings of Communist
Party members after the beginning, I guess, of normalisation, when
something like a quarter of a million committee members screened 1.5
million members of the Communist Party. What was the purpose of that
screening?

“Yes, it’s strange, actually – one doesn’t read about that very
much.

“But I think it was absolutely pivotal to normalisation.

“First purges were aimed at the really public, celebrity figures of the
Prague Spring. But then they were mandated at every single workplace.”

“Originally the Soviets hoped to simply put in a new regime straight
after the invasion.

“They saw that was impossible and they let Dubček hang on until April
1969. Husák took over and then the purges started in the summer.

“First they were aimed at the really public, celebrity figures of the
Prague Spring.

“But then these purges really were mandated at every single workplace.

“Even if nobody was purged, everybody received a form which they had to
answer. And they had to say if they agreed or disagreed with the invasion,
among other things.

“In a sense it was a pledge of allegiance.

Jaroslav Dietl, photo: Czech Television
“It turned everybody into signatories to normalisation. I think that was
a really important part of trying to understand the context of
collaboration, or perhaps one would call it something milder, after
1968.”

For those who don’t get the reference, who is the greengrocer of your
title?

“The greengrocer is of course Václav Havel’s greengrocer. I sort of
posit his idea of the greengrocer as the everyday man in his wonderful
essay about the greengrocer [The Power of the Powerless] with the sort of
everyday man that the television writer Jaroslav Dietl created in his
serials.

“In a way, unfortunately, Jarolsav Dietl’s everyday man was a little
closer to the truth than the sort of wished for greengrocer.

“Havel describes the greengrocer in terms of this very wide, odd spectrum
of collaboration that normalisation sort of demanded.

“He hopes for the greengrocer to take a stand, but I think it was more
complex than sometimes Havel realised.”

Were the only two choices to essentially accept normalisation and accept
one-party rule, or to become a dissident?

“No, I don’t think so.

“I think that was part of the problem. That was why ultimately Charter 77
and Havel and other dissidents had such a resonance here in the West.

“My book also deals with the question of why did they have so little
resonance within Czechoslovakia among ordinary citizens.

“Part of that problem is precisely that it was set up in a very sort of
binary opposition.

“Whereas the ‘70s and ‘80s normalisation, or late communism as I
refer to it, was very much about the grey areas.

“Charter 77 was set up in a very sort of binary opposition. Whereas the
‘70s and ‘80s normalisation was very much about the grey areas.”

“Indeed, in the mid-1980s there was a big rumpus within Charter 77, where
all these younger signatories, who were not Prague-based, were writing to
the Prague headquarters and saying, We can’t relate to you, you don’t
relate to us, you don’t actually about how we think and we have sort of
united forces, not with other Charter signatories but actually with younger
people who have different interests, different passions, different ideas
that they’re pursuing – and it’s these people that are now speaking
to what an opposition will be.”

There’s also a sense, I think, that the carrot of normalisation was
consumerism – that people received more products. But how does that
square with the general image of communism as being a period of scarcity,
of queues and of lack?

“I have to say I don’t like that whole carrot metaphor that’s always
used.

“I think in terms of becoming a consumer if you have even less to consume
I think that in fact forms you as a consumer even more.

“Because whether you’re on the hunt for something as vital as toilet
paper or as desirable as 1980s VCRs and calculators, it changes your
everyday practices.

“I think in many ways because of this emphasis on consumerism or
consumption, because there wasn’t that much (Czechoslovakia was still
better off than other East Bloc countries, but nevertheless, because of
that everything was framed in terms of consumption).

“So when the Velvet Revolution happened the idea of joining the West, of
becoming European again, of entering that capitalist realm was framed in
terms of consumption – and that led to a lot of disappointments.”

You also speak in your book about the role played by television in
normalisation. In a nutshell, what was that role?

“In 1968, during the Prague Spring, radio still had, I would say, the
most prominent role.

“But this was the moment when television began to shine.

“So when the invasion happened and the purge began, the key targets were
the media: Even as they were purging these media centres, they were also
trying to figure out how they could use them.

“They realised it was necessary.

“They were doing surveys left and right, reading letters from citizens
and they realised statistically that everybody was switching off the news.

“So they ended up sort of inserting the information they wanted to get
across into the entertainment production instead.

Hospital at the End of the City, a television series (1977) by Jaroslav Dietl
“Television serials were particularly potent for this, in large part
because Jaroslav Dietl, this famous television writer – who in fact was
very much for the Prague Spring and they had to bring him back; he had to
sort of purge himself a little bit [laughs] and they brought him back –
had been fascinated back in the ‘50s and ‘60s with the genre of the
television serial.

“Jaroslav Dietl had sort of convinced Czechoslovak Television to let him
write these – and they were very popular.

“This was a perfect vehicle and he was a skilled writer and he made the
decision to write these television serials.

“The regime was really able to use them as a way to have discussions in a
seemingly non-political way, to have discussions about key issues that show
that they were solving problems: solving problems with housing, with single
mothers, with a broken-down health care system.

“All of these could sort of be sorted through seeing the images of these
good, kind, constructive Communists who understand the errors of ways and
were able to change things and get Czechoslovakia back on the right
path.”

One thing you also refer to in your book is returnees, people who left
Czechoslovakia after 1968 and then came back and in some cases appeared on
TV, explaining where they’d gone wrong.

“Right. Exactly. The numbers weren’t huge, but certainly the call to
émigrés, to people like my parents who had fled, there were cycles of
that.

“They were promised pardons and people did return.

“In terms of becoming a consumer, if you have even less to consume I
think that in fact forms you as a consumer even more.”

“Because it’s very hard. It’s very hard to show up in a foreign
country without the language, without the contacts, friends, family, money,
cultural knowledge.

“So understandably it could be enticing to return with a pardon.

“In return for that, they were often met right on the tarmac, they were
interviewed, in order to say, of course, what was wrong with their
experience in the West.

“That sort of narrative was able to be woven into the narrative of the
socialist good life, which going back to the consumerism question, was the
recognition that, Well yes, we can’t offer all consumer goods that the
West has, but we can offer other things: the socialist good life.

“That means, You know, we’re not going to monitor that you work that
hard at work, we won’t really check in on the 9 to 5, you’ll have lots
of time for hobbies, friends, social life and so forth – that is what we
can offer.”

Is it possible to speak generally about how normalisation is perceived
today?

“I’m not sure I could actually speak to that. But I have to say that
it’s shocking… I’m sure you’ve read those newspaper articles as
well about the interviews on the streets and asking people, Who was Husák?
Who was Dubček? What happened in 1968?